The inventive concept relates to electronic systems including a low-power core and a high-performance core, as well as methods of operating same.
In order to selectively provide high speed performance with relatively high power consumption and low speed performance with relatively low power consumption, certain mobile application processors include separate “high-performance” and “low-power” processing “cores”. Such differently configured cores provide different system performance capabilities, benefits and limitations, and are commonly integrated in a single chip. Of course, the high-performance core not only consumes more power, but also generates more heat. In contrast, the low-power core consumes less power and generate less heat, but such advantages come at the cost of slower (or fewer) processing capabilities.
When the computational “load” placed upon a multi-core, central processing unit (CPU) increases to a first threshold during operation of a low-power core, the CPU may switch execution of the load from the low-power core to a high-performance core in order to complete the set of tasks forming the load in a timely manner. Analogously, when the load placed on the CPU falls below a second threshold, execution of the load may be switched from the high-performance core to the low-power core in order to conserves power.